ABSTRACT
Pope Paul had decided there would be no formal procession for the opening. He did not enter with the usual papal pomp, nor did he bless the bishops; he came as a brother. The Mass celebrated by the dean of the cardinals, Cardinal Tisserant, seemed more of a public spectacle than a religious observance. After the Mass, through which he prayed from his kneeler, the Pope recited the oath against modernism, a juridical, polemical oath that seemed to unwind the clock by fifty years; not in its doctrinal substance, but in its tone. The Pope called Christ by the name dear to the East, Pantocrator, "the maker and ruler of the world", for in Eastern theology Christ is seen as a cosmic figure, the pattern in which worldly history was conceived; the West has preferred the equally biblical but legal image of Redeemer.
